AMD Ryzen 5 5500F review: Vermeer rides again for budget gaming PCs

In games, we saw the Ryzen 5 5500F consume more power than the base 5500, actually reaching toward its 65W thermal design. In applications, the opposite is true. The 5500F actually consumed slightly less power than the base 5500, particularly in all-core workloads where the 5500 pushes past its 65W thermal design.

In y-cruncher multi-thread with AVX enabled, the 5500F drew 14.6% less power on average compared to the base 5500 and Core i3-14100F. In Linpack, the 5500F shaved more than 20% of the wattage of the 5500, and in Handbrake using VP9, it cut 12%. We don’t use software monitoring for our power measurements. Results are gathered from the EPS cables themselves.

Image 1 of 13

Looking at idle and active idle power measurements, the 5500F maintains Zen 3 low-power idle state, sipping just 7 watts during YouTube playback, dropping down to 6 watts at true idle. The 7600X provides a hint at where idle power draw has gone in the Zen 4/5 era.

As a result of lower power draw in some tests, it’s no surprise that the 5500F ends up more efficient than the 5500 in y-cruncher and Linpack. In Cinebench and Blender, however, the two CPUs are closely aligned in efficiency, with the 5500F actually coming out slightly less efficient in the Junkshop scene.

Image 1 of 3

Our scatterplots are a good way to visualize efficiency. In Handbrake, you can see the 5500F provided better performance than the 5500 while consuming less power. In Blender, however, the two CPUs consumed roughly the same power, while the 5500F provided better performance.

Across all of our efficiency tests, the comparison for Intel isn’t great. Not only does the 14100F struggle in all-core workloads, it does so with higher power consumption, occasionally pushing above 80W.

Test Setup

As with all of our CPU reviews, we used as close to identical test setups as possible to isolate CPU performance. There are several steps we take with hardware to normalize results, such as using the same fan speed across each test bench, as well as tweaks we make to the software stack to represent true performance.

Our test images are based on Windows 24H2. We use the same Nvidia driver across both the RTX 2080 Ti and RTX 5090. Additionally, our test images never cross platforms, so chipset drivers on an Intel platform never see an AMD chip, or vice versa. Application versions are pinned where possible. For games, where pinning isn’t possible, we do regression testing in the event of an update, and if required, retest the pool of chips if the performance profile has changed.

Finally, we tweak the BIOS. Every system has access to EXPO/XMP, as well as ReBAR. Virtualization-Based Security (VBS) is disabled. For Intel systems, we use the default power profile, not more extreme power profiles that aren’t covered under warranty. Similarly, we disable AMD’s Precision Boost Overdrive (PBO), as it can push the processor outside warrantied specifications.

MORE: CPU Benchmark Hierarchy

MORE: AMD vs. Intel

MORE: Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus review

MORE: AMD Ryzen 7 9850X3D review